I love the scene where the guy is fantasizing about playing tennis. I love the ending. Before my Wife, I spent most of my life pretending to listen to my significant others. All the while wondering whether the other person noticed I wasn’t listening. This was my story and, I am sure, for a lot other people.

Watching a film being dissected is better than reading about it. Mostly because you have to rely less on your memory. This two-part analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is an excellent example of that. The drama of The Shining overwhelms many of its hidden clues.

Part one deals with how the film was constructed to be scary. The techniques employed by Kubrick.

Part two is more of what Kubrick was trying to say indirectly. The connection to America and its American Indian past is fascinating.

Also click “more” in the side window, there are some juicy tidbits and facts about the movie there.

I try my darnest not to buy things that I don’t need (and even somethings I partially need) and yet I find myself overwhelmed with stuff!! The sheer amount of chargers is insane. Here is a smart ad that partially addresses that helplessness.

Awesome Rap video that connects modern Black poverty to White colonialism. Every aspect of the video production is quite good but the location choices is exceptional. Combining with the cinematography, it effectively balances English Vicitorian withÂ the modern urbanscape.

Brilliant animation. The underlying questions are also quite brilliant. Do we breed death for our amusement? Do we only feel tragic loss? Do we only celebrate our dead? Is War just another form of entertainment?

This is just the iTunes exclusive download version, a shorter one will be released to TV stations. There’s also gonna be a 34 minute long version…

This video clocks in at 9 minutes and 22 secs. I am curious to see the 34 minute version because there are many things left unexplained. The acting is good, the drama is captivating. A pretty daring move for a very mainstream artist.

Scarlet Johansson seems to carving a little niche in the music video format. She was equally elusive in Dylan’s “When the Deal Goes Down“.

A great PBS documentary on how the Bush adminstration used the media to get public support for the Iraq war:

In a four-hour special, News War, FRONTLINE examines the political, cultural, legal, and economic forces challenging the news media today and how the press has reacted in turn. Through interviews with key figures in print, broadcast and electronic media over the past four decades — and with unequaled, behind-the-scenes access to some of today’s most important news organizations, FRONTLINE traces the recent history of American journalism, from the Nixon administration’s attacks on the media to the post-Watergate popularity of the press, to the new challenges presented by the war on terror and other global forces now changing — and challenging — the role of the press in our society.

This is part of the series where the focus is on Bush’s spin. However, the negative attention is less on Bush and more on the American journalists that played along.

This could have been an horrible, over-produced, over-the-top, drama-thon but in the hands one of our favorite directors here at Ticklebooth, Floria Sigismondi, the video has all of that but also some raw emotional scar running through it. This is not my favorite work of Sigismondi by a long shot, it is what it is…

Watch it (Youtube link – but you have to sign in & all that crap, so if you want to see it, click “more” at the bottom of the post. It will take you to the embedded movie.)

Also: Check out this young girl courageously singing the vocally challenging song. Remember she is singing to a webcam and, most likely, isn’t trained. This is what music can do.